Film Review: Free State of Jones

This year, two major dramas are being released about rebellions in the American South during the 19th century. One is Nate Parker’s Birth Of A Nation, a tale of enslaved African-American Nat Turner, who led an anti-slavery rebellion in Virginia in 1831. Even the film’s posters are unapologetic in their depiction of the racism of the era, showing a black man being hung by a noose bearing the American flag.

The other film is Free State of Jones. And it’s a disgrace. It’s the person who tweets “All Lives Matter” after another unarmed black man is killed by police in America. It’s a Civil War film that only addresses race to add “Some white folks had it bad, too!”

Matthew McConaughey plays Newton Knight, a real Mississippi farmer so appalled by the horror and inequality of war that he defects from the Confederate army. He sets up camp in the swamp with some escaped black slaves, and their community eventually grows into the titular self-declared nation of poor white farmers and runaways.

Director Gary Ross and co-writer Leonard Hartman seem to think they’re presenting Knight as a hero, but play into every Narcissistic White Saviour trope going. Constantly asserting that class, not race, is the main injustice in the South, Knight monologues – at one point, even co-opting the N-word – while the black characters are largely silent. Knight also has an affair with an enslaved black woman, Rachel (Gugu Mbatha-Raw), while ignoring her plight, because apparently the sexualisation of black women by white men is even more romantic if the women are slaves and rape victims.

The film’s poorly presented politics are rendered all the more offensive by the unbearably sluggish pacing and endless sermonising. Archive photos, flash-forwards and title cards further interrupt the action, reducing Free State Of Jones to a droning history lesson intended to downplay racism and make white people feel better about themselves. History has had quite enough of that, thank you.